Former McGlinchey Stafford building becomes hub for entrepreneurial companies

Former McGlinchey Stafford building becomes hub for entrepreneurial companies

by
Kate Moran, The Times-Picayune

Monday April 13, 2009, 5:25 PM

A collection of technology and startup companies started moving last month into the former McGlinchey Stafford building on Magazine Street, launching what they hope will become a hub for recruiting and retaining young, entrepreneurial talent in New Orleans.

The project is the brainchild of the Idea Village and GNO, Inc., nonprofit business groups that have tried to create an atmosphere that evokes the creative, freewheeling culture of Silicon Valley in the heart of this city's buttoned-up central business district.

The building is not an incubator designed to foster fledgling businesses, but rather a home for established companies whose founders share similar values and believe they will derive a social and intellectual benefit from clustering at a single address.

Six anchor tenants have either leased or agreed to lease space inside the building, including Carrollton Technology Partners, TurboSquid, Launch Pad and iSeatz.com, the city's only Inc. Magazine 500 company. The Idea Village itself plans to relocate to the building, as does Couhig Partners, a law firm that specializes in intellectual property.

Kenneth Purcell, chief executive of iSeatz, said the company's former offices on Canal Street were a handicap in recruiting employees from technology centers like Dallas and Chicago who were used to more modern, collaborative work spaces. The McGlinchey building, now called The I.P., allows dogs and has a gym with a sauna and showers.

Purcell hopes the building, whose name is shorthand for intellectual property, will foster the same sort of energy and entrepreneurial spirit that flourished inside the building in New York City where his company temporarily relocated after Hurricane Katrina. Startups-turned-mainstays such as priceline.com and the online magazine salon.com congregated at that address, called Tech Space.

"This building will enable us to bring a different sort of white collar worker to New Orleans," Purcell said.

The building's appeal does not end with its ability to draw creative workers. Tim Williamson, president of the Idea Village, said he expects it to help retain the young and upwardly mobile set that will form friendships and business connections inside the building. His group plans to organize programs inside the lobby to bring together the various tenants.

"There will be a lot of interaction by virtue of being in the same building," said Chris Schultz, whose is starting a company called Launch Pad that will provide low-cost office space to freelance writers, designers and others launching a new business who cannot afford to sign a long-term lease.

Williamson said the Idea Village has been turning over the idea of a hub for entrepreneurs for almost 10 years. Michael Hecht, the new chief executive of GNO, Inc., begun mulling a similar idea, and the two managed to recruit a number of companies whose leases happened to be running out this year. The six anchor tenants they assembled have scooped up almost a third of the 85,000 square feet inside the building, located at 643 Magazine St.

"There might not be a Fortune 500 moving to New Orleans, but we together create a virtual billion-dollar effort inside this building," Purcell said.

Developer Brian Gibbs purchased the building from the law firm McGlinchey Stafford last July. He intended to convert it into apartment housing, but he said he was intrigued by the opportunity to help attract and retain boutique businesses in the city. The viability of his apartment buildings, including the high-rise he is erecting at 930 Poydras, hinges in many ways on the affluence of the city's workforce.

"Our resident base, to some extent, depends on a healthy office market," he wrote in an e-mail. ".¥.¥.I see the I.P. as my opportunity to be proactively involved with economic development by driving the demand side of the equation."

Austin Marks, chief of staff at GNO, Inc., said his group hoped to launch similar buildings on the north shore and in the river parishes. He and Williamson said they are trying to build a community of entrepreneurs across the region, an effort that does not stop once the McGlinchey building is filled.

Kate Moran can be reached at kmoran@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3491.

You can be in there and we'd love to have you. Check out: http://launchpadnola.com for details. We're opening June 1st. We're going to keep the website updated with all info. If you've got a larger business we'll get you in touch with Brian Gibbs directly.